Finally got it working with USB hard drives.
Dummydisk.sys was remade, many many thanks to Anton Bassov, who responded to my emails and gave the hint what had to be changed in source code, despite being a single statement.
The new rdummy.sys worked fine loaded from txtsetup.sif
Without rdummy.sys:

With rdummy.sys:

Furthermore- Setup considers it as critical SCSI driver and adds it as service in the new installation starting at boot time. Every USB hard disk attached is seen as removable. This is not wanted, will be taken care of.
[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\ControlSet001\Services\rdummy] "Type"=dword:00000001 "Start"=dword:00000000 "Group"="SCSI miniport" "ErrorControl"=dword:00000001 [HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\ControlSet001\Services\rdummy\Enum] "0"="Root\\LEGACY_RDUMMY00" "Count"=dword:00000001 "NextInstance"=dword:00000001
A little bug in the driver- if during Txt Setup when disks are detected and/or format or repartitioning performed, quit by pressing F3 causes BSOD, without any harms though. The driver doesn't have unload functionality, I believe that's why, may be Anton or anyone else familiar with this matter could add such.
If Setup is let to finish copying files and restart everything is fine, no BSODs, unattended install was performed without any glitches with XP SP2 source. Boot.ini and source folders are as with USB sticks.
Next days I'll add the necessary changes to the bat files, wimb already included an excellent help file so not much left to be done here.
A few more results:
Make small (15MB) image file, mount it as disk, copy boot files there ($win_nt$.~bt folder, setupldr.bin, ntdetect.com and txtsetup.sif in root), use Grub4Dos to mount it as fd0- no go, Setup starts, but cannot find biosinfo.inf in $win_nt$.~bt. Grub4Dos floppy is ignored, why it searches in $win_nt$.~bt? TXT Setup considers it as hard disk. Copy all files for ~BT folder to root- same result.
Mount it as non- existing HD- hd5. Same story, in previous tests I found that setup insist on having all boot files on first HD or complains about biosinfo.inf
setupldr.bin in 6 XP boot floppies differs from normal XP setupldr.bin. Using it didn't help, neither disk101 marker files.
I've tried also to speed up USB boot, moving usbstor.sys, disk.sys and all usb drivers to earlier stages, like in [BootBusExtenders], this didn't help. It seems like Setup loads all drivers, but actually starts them when "WINDOWS IS STARTING" is displayed. I've read similar statement in the past, no idea where it was.
Regards,
ilko



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